Your comment suggests you don't know what at minimizer is, and I think you just wanted to say "Google is bad" to the first story related to Google.

Which is a pity, but smarter trolls than you will have a go at them later.

If this is a constrained minimizer then Libre Office and Open Office will suddenly get a major improvement in their solver functionality for example, because at the heart of a solver is a decent non linear minimizer.

To be fair, he did ask for *practical uses*, not what it is mathematically. Practical uses include the examples given in the article. Another example from computer vision would be to find world positions of 2D image features based on a set of pictures from different positions.